Comment by culi
1 day ago
Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn".
Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here
And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can
I think is that a lot of professional work is not about entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel approach to the problem every time.
In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine.
It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response.
"It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.
I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language.
But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including